Mayor Bulldozer’s Absence Casts Shadow as Lawmakers Meet

March 5 (Bloomberg) -- Known as “Mayor Bulldozer” for the
massive infrastructure projects he built while running the
eastern Chinese city of Nanjing, Ji Jianye traveled to Beijing
last year to represent his province in the national legislature.
He won’t be at this year’s gathering which starts today.

Ji, 57, is one of at least 11 delegates to the National
People’s Congress to resign or be expelled from the Communist
Party after being put under investigation for bribery and other
wrongdoing since Xi Jinping became president a year ago,
according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The list includes an
executive at a state telecommunications giant, a trade union
boss, and a regional boss at an energy company formerly headed
by Zhou Yongkang, the former public security czar who is said by
state media to be involved in a corruption probe.

Their absence from the Great Hall of the People is evidence
of Xi’s efforts to swat both “tigers” and “flies,” a
reference to high-level officials and lower-level technocrats.
For the almost 3,000 NPC members who meet in the capital, it is
a reminder of the party’s dueling priorities of maintaining
economic growth of 7.5 percent while limiting social unrest
caused by disquiet over corruption and environmental damage. Xi
made an anti-graft drive a cornerstone of his first year as
president after he identified official bribery as a threat to
the existence of the party.

Longer List

“The list of delegates sacked is longer than in past years
but not perhaps of sufficient magnitude to send shivers through
the spines of the NPC,” said Andrew Wedeman, a political
science professor at Georgia State University who studies
corruption in China. “The signs that Zhou Yongkang is going
down are increasingly strong and a move to publicly take him out
would create major political shock waves.”

Some people have used membership of the congress for
personal gain, NPC spokeswoman Fu Ying said yesterday. A scandal
in which 512 delegates to the local People’s Congress of
Hengyang city in central Hunan province resigned after being
found to have taken bribes to vote for candidates for the
provincial legislature was the “most serious” in NPC history,
she said.

Spending on official overseas visits, vehicles and
hospitality was reduced by 35 percent, Premier Li Keqiang told
the opening session of the legislature today. The government
will build a system to combat corruption and “penalize
offenders without mercy,” Li said.

Rich Lawmakers

The annual political gathering brings together businessmen
and officials for about two weeks of discussion on the direction
of economic and other policies. NPC delegates are chosen in
their home provinces from lower-level people’s congresses and
serve five-year terms.

Ninety members of the body last year were on the list of
China’s 1,000 richest people published by the Shanghai-based
Hurun Report. At that meeting, newly-installed Premier Li
Keqiang called corruption “incompatible with the nature of the
government like fire is to water.”

Since then the party’s crackdown has netted targets in the
military, state security and state-owned enterprises. The total
number of cases opened against officials in China by party
disciplinary agencies rose 11 percent last year from 2012, and
included 31 high-ranking or high-profile officials, according to
a Jan. 11 report by the official Xinhua News Agency.

Discipline Violations

The cases of the 11 disgraced NPC officials identified by
Bloomberg were among a list published on the website of the
party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection or in state
media. They included Chen Anzhong, the chairman of the Jiangxi
Federation of Trade Unions, and Xu Long, the general manager of
China Mobile’s Guangdong operations. Both are under
investigation for “severe discipline violations,” a term
commonly used to cover a variety of offenses.

Nanjing’s “Mayor Bulldozer” is the former party secretary
of ex-President Jiang Zemin’s hometown Yangzhou in central
Jiangsu Province. Ji sparked public protests in 2011 after
ordering sycamore trees to be cut down or moved to make way for
a subway project. He was “morally corrupt,” according to a
Jan. 30 statement from the discipline commission. Efforts by
Bloomberg News to contact the three former officials by calling
their last place of work were unsuccessful.

Zhou Links

Another ousted NPC member, Li Dongsheng, is the former
general manager of a China National Petroleum Corp. branch in
Sichuan, a company tied by state-owned and foreign media to a
probe into former Politburo Standing Committee member Zhou. Li,
who recently resigned from the NPC, according to a Feb. 27
Xinhua report, couldn’t be reached for comment.

It’s too early to tell if the campaign is changing public
perceptions of corruption in the party as it has clear limits,
according to Jean-Pierre Cabestan, a professor of politics at
Hong Kong Baptist University.

“It’s hard to deny there’s quite a number of tigers,”
Cabestan said. “As far as corruption, there’s a political
agenda behind it.”

At least 7 out of 20 high-profile corruption cases since
the 18th Party Congress installed Xi as party leader in Nov.
2012 are related to Zhou, according to Wang Yuhua, an assistant
professor in political science at the University of
Pennsylvania.

The downfall of Zhou would boost Xi’s anti-corruption
credibility with the public, Wang said. “However, this is more
consistent with a purge. It is clearly a targeted crackdown on a
particular faction within the party.”

Bo Ally

Zhou was a supporter and ally of former Chongqing Party
secretary and NPC delegate Bo Xilai, who was fired after he gave
a defiant speech at the meetings of the legislature in 2012. Bo
was sentenced to life in prison in September on charges of
corruption.

“I can see a scenario where they pick all of Zhou’s allies
off and break the back of whatever power he still has within the
party and that’s the end of it,” said Wedeman. “Whether they
want to go on and achieve an anti-corruption goal might open
doors to other people that I really can’t imagine Xi Jinping
wants to go through.”